Targeted cash assistance provided by the IRC allows displaced families to meet their needs in a flexible and dignified way.

Miriam*, 65, spends her days sitting on a floor mat in her brother’s home, massaging her swollen arms and legs. She lives in a village set among sweeping green fields in northeast Syria. When war descended over two years ago and armed fighters closed in, her family fled. They returned late last year after local authorities secured the area, but at that point, Miriam could barely walk.

The International Rescue Committee and Sesame Workshop—the nonprofit, educational organization behind Sesame Street—are working together to give millions of refugee children in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and northern Iraq the support they need to learn, grow and thrive.

“ISIS killed my husband,” Abeer* says as she sits in her sweltering tent in a windswept camp in the suburbs of Baghdad. Her three children, ages 9, 10 and 13, keep close to her as she describes the trauma they experienced over the past three years.

Two month old Mamie Koiwo screwed up her face in surprise and let out a brief wail as a nurse in apple green scrubs administered the polio vaccine. In October, Mamie entered the world just twenty feet away in the delivery ward of the Konia Health Centre in Lofa county, northern Liberia. Only days earlier, the last Ebola case had been registered in the country in the largest outbreak ever recorded, leading to over 4800 confirmed deaths in Liberia alone.